Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this multiple Oscar winner features a great deal of cynicism -- and profanity. Obscene speech tumbles out of the mouths of well-educated and articulate characters -- broadcasters, in fact -- who angrily yell and scream about the ugly state of the world and current events (many specific to the 1970s and the Ford Administration, others that are resonant of today). One denies God's existence as a comforting illusion (but then he goes insane and thinks he's talking to God regularly, so there) and talks about democracy and individualism as being outmoded and dead. A group of violent, left-wing radicals are depicted getting their own TV show (apparently it's a winner, too). The main character, Max, supposedly the film's moral center, leaves his wife for the pretty, much younger, and thoroughly carnivorous Diana; he even says their affair is going to be a disaster, and it is. Diana is fleetingly topless in one of their sex scenes, which is quite brief (an intimacy problem she has, she explains).
Families can talk about the many disturbing propositions the movie puts forth: that greedy corporations control everything (broadcast news is only a part of it); that TV is a horrible, destructive force; and that the generation of viewers who grew up with TV are somehow damaged. Keep in mind that evening network TV (cable TV was practically nonexistent), when this film came out, was filled with inoffensive stuff like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Barnaby Jones, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and most of the current programming of Nickelodeon's TV Land -- hardly the Fall of Civilization. Do you think writer Paddy Chayefsky accurately predicted garbage TV, or are the worst of his imaginings still to come?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.
The scathing multiple Oscar nominee NETWORK is often said to be the movie that predicted the advent of "trash TV." Though marketed as satire, it was not a belly-laugh parody like Scary Movie, but rather a stern, grownup broadside that set out to shock and outrage. In fact, over the years a few of its details are hardly farfetched anymore; not in the 21st-century tubescape of voyeuristic Reality shows, sleazy music-video channels, news sensationalism, and circus-freak daytime talk. Kids who come home from school to The Jerry Springer Show might wonder what the fuss is all about.
But Network bristles with righteous anger, featuring especially caustic dialogue by legendary writer Paddy Chayefsky, who was one of the great script authors of early TV drama. By the mid-1970s he didn't like what he was seeing, and the narrative takes place in a post-Watergate atmosphere of darkest cynicism, homegrown terrorism, Third World atrocities, oil shortages, inflation, recession, amorality, and all-around bad news. Just about every character, even minor ones, gets to do angry oratory that could blister the wallpaper.
The network of the title here is a mythical, low-rated, fourth TV channel called UBS (you might have to tell young viewers that when this film was made there only were three commercial networks in the U.S., and cable was insignificant) operated by a giant company called CCA. The order comes to lay off the aging UBS nightly news anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch), newly widowed (sounds like it wasn't a happy marriage anyway; none of them here are). Beal reacts by announcing live on the air that he'll shoot himself in the head on his farewell broadcast.
Afterwards he begs his best friend and longtime producer Max (William Holden) for a second chance to bid a more dignified goodbye. Max is already stung that his news division has been taken from him and handed over to CCA's commercial-entertainment department, under predatory young executive Diana (Faye Dunaway), so he grants Howard's request. This time Beale does a profane tirade about the world being a godless "insane slaughterhouse" and says he just "ran out of bulls--t."
Both Max and Howard are fired, but stronger-than-usual viewer ratings make CCA put Beale back on the air again and let him rant and rave -- as long as people keep tuning in. Max thinks Howard Beale needs psychiatric treatment instead. Beale gets more and more unstable, until he thinks he hears the voice of God (or something) talking to him. In a classic scene (Finch won a posthumous Oscar for his acting) a rainswept Howard Beale makes an especially crazed entrance into the studio one stormy night, ordering viewers at home to throw open their windows and shout "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" All across the country, they do.
Now Diana gives The Howard Beale Show a makeover as a tacky variety program, surrounding "the mad prophet of the airwaves" with fortune-telling psychics, gossip columnists, and a live in-studio audience. Beale's uncensored, apocalyptic speeches are a hit, but when he reveals to the public some dirty secrets about CCA's business dealings, the bosses are suddenly very unhappy.
Max is the jaded protagonist who seems to uphold old ways of basic decency and journalism ethics. Yet when he discovers that Diana secretly idolized him, he leaves his wife for an affair with the sexy, ratings-obsessed programmer who represents everything he detests (on the side, Diane develops a Reality show following the adventures of a Communist terrorist gang), a relationship even he predicts will be a disaster. Somehow, in the bitter what-the-hell milieu, their unlikely fling is more convincing than not. Chayefsky doesn't let the viewer off easy, and the pitiless finale (featuring the only onscreen violence in the film) suggests this is only the beginning of an ugly new era for American TV.
This movie begs the question three decades later: Has TV gotten better or worse? Have values-based cable-TV channels such as Christian broadcasting, Oxygen, Disney, Nickelodeon, or Lifetime made TV better or not? Network seems especially on-target about the idea of huge, anything-for-money corporations running the media (and everything else), a pathology that's only worsened since the 1970s.
More recent cinematic complaints about TV include the R-rated The TV Set. But for a fact-based PG-rated film that rosily recalls the glory days of broadcasting (where the fictitious Max and Howard declare they got their start in the business), check out Good Night, and Good Luck, about hero journalist Edward R. Murrow. For another in-depth look at the network news, try Frontline's four-part News War series.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentA fleetingly topless Faye Dunaway in a brief bedroom sex scene. She's the love object of an aging broadcaster's adulterous affair, which is much discussed but otherwise not visually explicit. |
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ViolenceOccasional bursts of gunfire, with one onscreen casualty. |
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LanguageMuch swearing, including plenty of f-words and the N-word, even on the air, in a manner the FCC wouldn't approve (yet). |
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Social BehaviorEvery character is hopelessly cynical and flawed. Max has an affair with a much younger woman, Howard Beale's insanity is exploited for ratings. The female lead (noted by Max as a child of the TV generation) is unapologetically selfish, amoral, materialistic, workaholic and, finally, murderous. One African-American character refers to herself using the N-word. Oil-rich Arabs, offscreen, are treated like a menace to Western civilization. |
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CommercialismSome actual TV commercials and references to TV characters (Archie Bunker) are scattered throughout the script, but it's hardly "product placement." |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoA few scenes of the principle characters drunk after a night at the bars. |
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